In his recent update on the progress of the petition, Rob Bowley mentions the Rural Payments Agency project. I can’t attest to either have been an ‘expert’ or to have had a salary anything near what he mentions, but I was a consultant on that project so nod in informed agreement. That experience gave me a benchmark to compare ‘bad’ ways of going about an IT project to compare with the ‘good’ world of lean and agile that I now inhabit.

Agile software development is inherently democratic. Choice over Prescription could be included in the Agile manifesto. We give the customer the choice, the choice to decide what is most important to them, what will deliver the greatest value and build that first. We do not prescribe that they must build a complex framework first- the software will evolve, You ain’t gonna need it (Yagni) until you need it.

The problem with this democracy, with this unleashed choice is that, if you don’t have the right mix of stakeholders, the (agile project) customer doesn’t always know what is best. They are not always the best people to choose.

There is a difference between domain knowledge and what I’ll call ‘experience’ knowledge. A banker may know the banking domain inside and out, they can tell you the difference between all the different types of balance and how (and where) they are calculated; closing balance, running balance, etc. But unless they have done any research with customers, unless they have ‘experience knowledge’, when it comes to a question such as which balance to provide as an SMS alert, their ‘domain’ knowledge is as good as your common-sense.

Imagine software were a supermarket store. IT are responsible for the construction of the store, the basic layout, the signage, the checkout, the peripherals. The business are responsible for what goes into the store, the merchanising, the planogram. The business imperative is to fill the shelves and shift the product. They want to spend their money to this goal, anything that does not directly support this will be of lower priority. That is their domain and they will prioritise that over anything else. If they could fill the store with nothing but shelves they’d probably be happy.

Now imagine visiting the store. There’s no carpark, there are no shopping trolleys, there’s no emergency exits. There’s no ramp for disabled customers. The shelves rise to eight foot high (with no steps to reach the heights), the aisles are difficult to negotiate because of promotional displays between the shelves. The business is happy, but what about the customer?

In the agile world, nobody is going to pay attention to this stuff unless it is prioritised. “Sorry, we didn’t build any shopping trolleys because you prioritised building more shelf space over them”.

When stating their choice, your stakeholder wears a commercial hat, they are thinking about their targets and those are based upon shifting product. They are living in thier operational business domain. But cold commercials are not what shifts product. It is the experience that does. Now go back to the democracy of choice on an agile project. Who is the ‘business’ specifiying requirements? Is it a balanced team? Is their an experience champion with an equal voice? Is the voice of the customer recgognised? If not, isn’t about time you got an customer experience champion onto the team.

On time, on budget, to the scope that was agreed from the outset of development. A successful project? Well no actually. It was a complete failure.

Here is a story about an insurance company with a number of differnet products sold through intermediaries. Whilst the intermediaries were good at selling single insurance products, they weren’t so good at cross-selling or up-selling other products. Focus groups with the intermediaries revealed that they didn’t know about all the other types of insurance available through the company.

What if the intermediaries could have a portal where they could access all our insurance products in the same place with customer alerts and sales support prompts identifying further selling opportunities?

From this initial idea a benefits case was pulled together consisting of a product definition and financial projections. In pulling together the benefits case, the potential revenue uplift numbers surprised everyone. Signing off the benefits case on the new Intermediary Portal was duly signed off, and the product definition was handed over to IT to build.

Being an agile IT shop, the business and developers sat down together and got their heads around the product definition. It soon became clear that the challenge was one of “single sign-on”. Each of the insurance products offered were on a different legacy application that required the intermediaries to sign-on with different credentials. To bring them all together in a single portal was far harder than the simple problem that the initial product definition suggested.

In pulling together the benefits case, a rough estimate had been supplied by IT. Now it was an in-flight project with an initial list of stories, it became clear that they had significantly under-estimated. Of the twenty different products that the business wanted on the portal, for the budget the business had set aside would deliver barely four products.

With new estimates a release plan was drawn up. Release one would deliver single sign-on across four products identified by the business as being most profitable. All the sales support tools were de-scoped and scheduled for a third release with the second release delivering single sign-on for the remaining products.

Development started, the business stakeholders worked closely with the developers and the First Release of the Intermediary Portal went live with congratulations all round. Funding for the next release was lined up depending upon the success of the first release. But that success never came, take-up was less than expected and the cross and up-selling never materialised.

The proposition to the intermediaries as delivered was flawed; the portal had to be all or nothing, single sign-on across four unrelated products was not compelling to them. There was no sales support. The intermediaries thought “so what?” IT had delivered on the business requirements yet the project was deemed a failure.

This story tells a striking lesson. The project failure was due to a lack of joined-up thinking. The business and IT both had followed their processes and done the right thing. The business had identified an opportunity, built a benefits case and had this signed off. IT had run a model agile project with close engagement with the business. However whilst both stages of the process were locally optimised, they were done in isolation of each other. Once the (development) train had left the station both sides were committed to delivering the product portal. No-one returned to the business case, no-one went back to the end users, the intermediaries and asked whether the cut down scope for the first release would actually be of value to them. More importantly, IT were engaged too late in the process. The business had settled on an IT solution to the problem without engaging IT. Had IT been party to the ideation and visioning process they would have been able to raise the risk of the project complexity earlier on. Indeed they could have killed the project before it started.

Returning to the initial problem; “intermediaries weren’t so good at cross-selling or up-selling other products… Focus groups with the intermediaries revealed that they didn’t know about all the other types of insurance available through the company.” The problem didn’t need a portal solution. The issue was one of awareness; almost certainly an off-line marketing campaign would have delivered a greater ROI without the need for IT to build the wrong product.

My daughter has just started at nursery school. Daddy, she asked me, do you do show and tells? Ummm, yes Olivia, we do. But we call them showcases. Daddy, when you start work in the morning do you sit in a circle? Ummm, yes Olivia, we do. But we don’t sit down. We call that Stand-ups. Daddy, do you draw pictures? Yes, we do, we call those wireframes. Daddy, do you play with Lego? Yes, we call that the lego game. Olivia. Yes Daddy. Do you want to come and work with us?!

Draw pictures to illustrate outcomes, design the user interface first and use that to prioritize requirements rather than working with written requirements.

In a single image you can convey a simple concept, an idea, a need or a desired outcome far quicker and more accurately than writing it in a sentence. This is especially so in developing software which more often than not is visually manifest as a user interface.

When we captured requirements in agile, we are effectively conveying a simple concept, idea, need or desired outcome as a requirement. And we do it in words. Those slippery things that are so often misunderstood. Things get really slippery when we try to prioritize those words against each other. Stories are laid out on the table and the team spend as much time discussing what each story actually means, as giving them priority. And because they are supposedly independent, you loose the inter-depedencies between them. Jeff Patton has written some great stuff on this.

So prioritization with stories can be flawed, especially when you are working with a large volume of requirements, say at the outset of a programme of work, and what you really want to do is get an idea of what a first release should be.

Throw out the stories. It’s too early to be writing words. Muda. Create illustrations of widgets and features and functions. Sketch out on post-its illustrations of the simplest implementation of the concept, idea, need or desire. On flip chart paper create blank screens that illustrate the interfaces that the requirement will be manifest on. Identify the stakeholders who will interact with the requirements. For example the retail website, the operational support application, the finance system. Now ask the team to stick onto the screens the sketches.

The challenge is to strip back to the minimal functionality that they really need for that first release. Let them draw extra functionality if they like, but everything must be on post-it notes. Now pull the post-it notes off, one by one. What if we removed this? What would happen if it wasn’t there? Is there something simpler we could do? Something more elegant? Is an operational function required to make the website function work? The exercise may be extended with pictures of legacy applications and data elements, again, stripping them back to the bare necessities for that first release.

That didn’t take long did it, and it looks like an initial release candidate. We’ve defined our scope in a way that we do not believe we can cut any more. Any less functionality would not be a meaningful release. Now we can get down to writing the stories, focusing our effort on something we are agreed looks right. We’ve prioritized pictures, outcomes over words; Picture Driven Design.

Velocity is a simple concept to grasp when planning and managing an agile project. It is one of the first formula you learn in maths (or is it physics), speed equals distance over time. On a project the distance is scope, measured in the number of ‘points’ you need to complete. So if the team has a hundred points worth of scope and a velocity of ten, they will complete distance (scope) in ten weeks. It’s a simple calculation, but is dangerous and wrong. It fails to take into account acceleration.

Just in the same way that it takes a car time to accelerate to a meaningful speed, so a project takes time to reach it’s planned velocity. To reach 60 miles an hour takes ten seconds and means moving through the gears. You don’t put your foot on the accelerator and suddenly find yourself doing sixty. Nor do you put the car into forth gear and expect to move without stalling. It is the same in agile projects. Velocity is misunderstood; you cannot expect to have your planned velocity immediately without acceleration. Similarly, putting a fall sized team onto a project is like trying to start in forth gear. You will stall.

When planning an agile project you need to consider acceleration. The first iterations will be slow as you come up to speed. Secondly you need to be in the right gear for where you are at. Start in first (small team) and change gear (ramp the team up) as the velocity requires it. Better to have the engine screaming in first (change gear) than to have it stall before it’s even got going.

Sadly, this means the simple pictures on burn-up and burn-down charts are wrong. They need to take into consideration acceleration and appropriate gearing. And that is advanced maths.

Two men were running through the jungle chased by a lion. One of them stopped, took off his backpack and took his trainers out. The other man turned around. “Why are you putting your trainers on?” he asked, “They won’t make you run faster than the lion”. To which the man replied “I don’t need to run faster than the lion…”

In the 1920’s Post and Kellogg’s went into the recession head to head. Post cut back, it reined in expenses and slashed advertising budget. Kelloggs meanwhile maintained their marketing spend and pushed their newly launched product, Rice Krispies. Today Kellogg’s are a household name. Where are Post?

IT organisations are retreating to core, keeping the lights on and holding off any “non-essential’ projects, innovation included. This is a shortsighted viewpoint, but not entirely unexpected. With project life cycles taking so long, innovation traditionally takes significant investment and time to see results. Modern lean and agile approaches to IT are a challenge to this entrenched view. It is possible to innovate at speed. It is possible to take an idea and turn it into something tangible in weeks rather than years. Let’s start with the idea. Where does it come from? You could get the brightest minds from expensive management consultancy firms, but they take time. And in uncertain times, what do they really know? (I speak with experience having once been a customer strategy management consultant). Alternatively you could harvest ideas from your customers. That’s what IdeaStorm does for Dell. And Mix does for Oracle (built by ThoughtWorks by the way). Don’t restrict this to your customers, building an internal ideas engine in the enterprise yields great results.

So once you’ve got the idea, how do you nurture it from a vision into a proposition that has legs?

Product innovation is all very well, but do you have the capability and the attitude to really do it? In the current ecomomic climate, unless product innovation is in your DNA, chances are it will need to be accompanied by process innovation. Why? Because most organisational processes are slow, cumbersome and hinder the agility required to really innovate.

At ThoughtWorks we do both these things for our clients all the time, helping them introduce aligity into the whole product development lifecycle; product innovation through process innovation. It starts with helping them rapidly distill their vision into something concrete, then prirotising and estimating what is important before building it at speed with quality to get innovation to market; fail fast or succeed sooner.

Recession doesn’t make the market need disappear. Andrew Rezeghi in this great paper (which is abound with stories of companies who have innovated through recession) argues you should invest in your customers, now they need you most, loyalty hangs in the balance. Whilst the market may be driving down prices, now is the time to focus on experience based differentiation. How can you use digital channels to engage with your customers in new and compelling ways? How can you harness social media and new interaction paradigms to delight and engage your customers? Ho can you innovate at speed? Go beyond your product and grow roots for lifetime value when the good times return.

I recently worked with a client where one of our deliverables were wireframes that illustrated how pages would be laid out and how the UI would work. We were quite pleased with the results, there was some quite complex AJAX based functionality that provided a really immersive, goal orientated experience that looked like it would make finding products easy and enjoyable. Testing the initial wireframes with users was an enlightening exercise, and demonstrated that the wireframes we had developed were not yet ready – users were not able to fulfill the goals they were set. More worrying, some of the complex functionality we were introducing just did not work (some of the navigation, filters and sorts were confusing, just presenting information on a single page would suffice).

Usability testing often gets discussed and is a good intention but all too often budgetary or time constraints mean it never happens. The user testing I refer to here impacted neither. We did our testing in a meeting room, the customer sitting at one end with a facilitator, and the team watching on the projection screen in the same room. We used a talk-aloud protocol walking through the static powerpoint wireframes that were linear in their presentation according to the ‘happy path’ to realise the customer goal. Someone took notes as we went through the wireframes (in the notes section at the bottom of the PowerPoint deck). It was quick and dirty but produced results. After a couple of sessions things that we, too close to the design, had missed. Changes to the wireframes took a few hours and allowed retesting the following day. Indeed we made some quite significant changes to the user interaction model. When we re-tested the wireframes the improvements were evident. The feedback was more positive; there were fewer blank faces, less confusion and “I’ve no idea what to do next” was never uttered. This was true iterative design in cycles that took a few hours. Compare this to the days if code was involved.

Where does this fit into the agile way of delivering software? In the agile/ lean zealot’s passion (and impatience) delivery, and their (dogmatic?) assertion that anything but code (working software) is waste, they loose focus upon what is really important, that of overall product quality. Product quality is not only zero/ minimal defects and meeting the business requirement, but also delivering something that is usable and delightful to use. Developers may do Test Driven Development, but this is based on assumptions that what they will code is right. TDD should start earlier in the process, Test Driven Design. It takes time to write your tests up-front, but we know it to be a good thing. So why not design the user interface (wireframes) and test that up front?

There’s this idea called the Disconfirmation of expectations theory that states that having unrealistically high expectations from the adoption of a new IT application will result in lower levels of realised benefits. Get customers excited about a new product and fail to deliver on it and you will have unsatisfied customers. And unsatisfied customers are unlikely to use the product to its full advantage.

There is a risk with products developed using agile approaches that they fail to deliver on their initial promise. The immediate stakeholders know that the product will evolve incrementally, but is this true of the broader audience? Are they aware of the intended regular heartbeat of delivery or are they expecting a fully featured product at the first release. How are you managing expectations beyond the immediate product team?

Be wary of what you say early on. Creating a vision is essential but be mindful of how this is communicated. Early demos, proof of concepts, prototypes, wireframes often show a vision of the end goal, several releases into the future. Words are easily forgotten, explaining that this is an end goal vision is not enough, you must show a vision of what the cut-down product for the first release is and ensure it is appropriately communicated.

Expectations work both ways, it is easy for the business to tell IT their requirements and assume they will be developed in their entireity in one go. Similarly it is easy for agile developers to expect the business to understand their incremental approach to delivery. The key to success is effective change management; identifying all stakeholders (both core and peripheral) and create a culture of agility that goes beyond the immediate project team. In a large organisation that maintains more traditional approaches, agile projects must be supported by a well designed communication plan that builds the relationship between both IT and the business. Identify whose life will be touched by the product and develop a strategy for communicating to them. This doesn’t mean “they can see what is going on on the project Wiki” this means someone taking responsilibity for listening, engaging and evangelising on the product, the project and its goals.

One of the great things with running a project with Microsoft Project is that it enables you to allocate resources to activities and you can assign the time they work on each activity. A resource can then work on several projects at the same time, 50% on project A, 50% on project B.

With this ability it is easier to accommodate multiple projects that the business request. Rather than having to say we can’t start on a project in six months when the current one finishes, we can run both projects at the same time, using the same resources. We can do things in parallel rather than in series.

Only it doesn’t really work like that.

One of the great things with running a project with Microsoft project is that it enables you to allocate resources in a way that hinders productivity, effective planning and quality.

No matter how efficient you think you are, multitasking comes with a high cost. Because we’re people, we don’t swap out the content of our brains as easily as a computer does, and we definitely don’t swap in the old state when we’re ready to return to the original task.

Gerald Weinberg, in Quality Software Management, Vol. 1, Systems Thinking (Dorset House, 1992), estimates the context-switching cost among three tasks to be 40 percent. That means that 40 percent of your available work time is spent on non-task activities. The rest of the time is split among the three projects. So, if you thought that in a 45-hour week, you could spend 15 hours on each of three tasks, don’t kid yourself. You’re really spending eight hours on project A; eight hours on project B; eight hours on project C; and 24 hours context-switching, figuring out where you were and what you have to do next. The time spent on each project works out to about half of what you expected.

So whilst it is easy to appear to please business sponsors by taking multiple projects on at the same time, and the model of working in parallel rather than in series being a politically favourable approach, in fact the costs of multi-tasking far outweigh the benefits.

Marc McNeill

For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He co-authored the book Agile Experience Design. As a consultant with ThoughtWorks he brought design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across their organisations with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. Today he is Customer Experience Director at Auto Trader. He has been known to dance and is rather partial to mangos.